For projects where a client needs to submit marketing text, but doesn't know how to use HTML or version control, you may need to give them something a little simpler. Jesse Hill wrote up a blog post about how his team had their client save their text to a Google spreadsheet. Then they wrote a simple script to read the text and convert it to templates. The source in the blog post is a good demo of the google_drive gem.

Yesterday John Pignata posted a great introduction to the importance of understanding concurrency in your applications… and to the term "Futures", which basically means calling a method asynchronously, and obtaining the value later.

He walks through writing a Hacker News HTML scraper, and how to turn it from blocking to non-blocking code. He makes it about 4 times faster in the process.

If you fork a Ruby subprocess, getting its results back in the parent can be a little tricky. The child process can’t pass variables back to the parent, so you have to manually manage an IO pipe. Fortunately, Rob Gleeson’s IChannel gem provides a friendly wrapper for this messiness. It can serialize with the Marshal, JSON, or YAML libraries out of the box, and it’s easy to add new serializers.

The folks over at ProPublica released DayBreak yesterday, an ultra fast Key Value store for Ruby. When you start Daybreak it loads in all data in to memory for fast reading, and all write commands happen asynchronously. The in memory database gets updated immediately when you write, and then the filesystem storage gets updated when it has time.

Clemens Helm has a blog post on using RSpec tags to categorize your tests by speed. He broke his tests into one group that’s fast enough to run with each refactoring on his dev box, and a second, slower group that’s run only by the continuous integration server. With RSpec tags, he was able to pick which group runs at any given time.

Previous Episodes

Despite Dave's raspy voice sounding like one of Marge Simpson's sisters, the show must go on! In the episode we cover speeding up your rails tests, a compilation of Rails 4 news, a way to win 1 million yen, request recorder, Chrome dev tools, and much much more.

Today's Ruby5 goes BOOM! with some great advice from Joe Ferris on testing Javascript and not getting carried away with RSpec's DSL. Evan Light shows us the pitfalls of accepts_nested_attributes_for, some fat model refactoring, and more, more! MORE!